Middle East / North Africa

The Kurds in Iraq occupy what is practically a state. The Syrian civil war has resulted in the autonomization of the country’s Kurdish population. To Kurdish advantage, the JDP’s (Justice and Development Party – Turkey) ambiguous policy has cleared a new political space in Turkey.

While the peace process between the PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party) and the Turkish government is at a standstill, the latter is attempting to circumvent Turkey’s Kurdish actors by aligning itself with the KDP (Kurdistan Democratic Party), which dominates the Kurdish regional government in Iraq...

Although the Kurdish population in Syria forms a very small and highly divided minority, the Kurds nevertheless have managed, thanks to the civil war, to gain relative autonomy in Northern Syria. 

Since 1991, Kurdish parties have dominated and administered “Iraqi Kurdistan”.

The First World War had tragic consequences for the Middle-East. It led to the partitioning of the Ottoman Empire and the balkanization of the region. 

Recent discussion surrounding a 'Turkish model' for the Arab world has centered mainly on the achievements of the AKP in Turkey and its supposed ideological proximity to the political parties that have arisen from the Muslim Brotherhood movement.

On 24 August 2011, President Idriss Déby Itno of Chad recognised the National Transitional Council (NTC) as the only legitimate authority in Libya. Until then, the Chadian president had been a firm ally of the Guide of the Great Jahamiriya, President Qaddafi of Libya. Déby had sustained his...

The discovery of petroleum wealth in the middle of the last century completely reconfigured the political economy of Qatar. Small local population size and low levels of labor force participation pushed Qatar to seek alternate sources of labor to meet burgeoning labor demands.

Facing threats on all its borders as well as social, economic and religious tensions, the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) are now under significant pressure in accomplishing their core mission: the survival of the State of Israel.